In the last ten years the use of handheld wireless communication devices has increased greatly. The rapid adaptation of handheld wireless communication devices has brought about a sea change in personal communications enabling ubiquitous reachability and instant access to communication networks.
Currently there is an interest in improving the functionality of handheld wireless communication devices, enabling them to be used for, among other things, more efficiently displaying multimedia content. Towards this end, there has been an interest in using vector graphics for communicating static or animated multimedia content. In a wireless communication context, vector graphics have the advantage relative to raster graphics that they require far less bytes to encode. Consequently, vector graphics demand far less bandwidth from wireless communication systems. Unfortunately, there is a trade off, to wit, the efficient encoding of vector graphics implies more computational effort to decode the vector graphics and produce viewable images therefrom. The latter process is known as rendering. The increased computational cost of rendering vector graphics is particularly problematic in the case of handheld wireless communication devices in as much as these devices are operated on batteries of limited size and increased computational cost engenders increased battery drain.
Thus, there is in general, a need for more efficient vector graphics decoding methods software and apparatus.